Saying sorry for the past is humbug: the right time for apologies is at the time

Cameron's 'regret' for the Amritsar atrocity reminds us that we never hear politicians recanting their own transgressions

Regrets ... David Cameron stopped short of offering a full apology in Amritsar, but he has enthusiastically joined in the dubious practice of saying sorry for the past. Photograph: Reporter#41763/ Reporter#41763/Demotix/Corbis

'We cannot admit this doctrine in any form," the secretary of state for the army said on 8 July 1920. "Frightfulness is not a remedy known to the British pharmacopœia." The Commons were debating the massacre of April the previous year, when troops under General Reginald Dyer had opened fire on a crowd near the Sikh Golden Temple in Amritsar, killing 379 Punjabis. Dyer had been officially criticised and had retired.

His supporters thought he had taught a salutary lesson, and it was them the war secretary addressed. Dyer's claim that he had been confronted "by a revolutionary army" was absurd. What defines an army? "Surely that it is armed. This crowd was unarmed." We could not govern India or anywhere else "on the basis of physical force alone", and it was monstrous to use violence to terrorise not only one crowd but "the whole country".

When David Cameron visited the site of the massacre in Amritsar yesterday he refrained from offering a full-scale apology. But he expressed deep regret for the atrocity, by way of quoting from that war secretary in 1920, who was of course Winston Churchill. This was a slight change of tack for Cameron. Before now he had enthusiastically joined in the dubious practice of apologising for distant events, begun by Tony Blair.

In Australia they went so far as to have a "National Sorry Day" (what a name!), a collective act of apology to the aboriginal inhabitants of the country. But this is humbug. The "wrong" done in the first place was the expropriation, and largely the extirpation, of the indigenous inhabitants.

If Australians of European descent really mean it, then the proper act of expiation would be for them all to go down to Sydney Harbour Bridge and jump off together, which would not be a good idea. Better would be trying to right the wrongs of today, in the here and now.

In each case, the apologist was expressing his regrets for something which had never been his own responsibility or fault, and had happened long before. But the right occasion for condemning some outrage or injustice is at the time. That does sometimes happen. Anyone can now abhor the violence of the Black and Tans and "Auxis" during the Irish Troubles of 1919-21, and there's nothing brave about making a schmaltzy, and grossly misleading, movie like Michael Collins, which completely distorts the story.

What took courage was to say then, as did HH Asquith – a former prime minister – that: "Things are being done in Ireland which would disgrace the blackest annals of the lowest despotism in Europe."

For that matter, it took courage for Churchill, who had not yet returned to the Tory fold but was a minister in a predominantly Tory government, to condemn Amritsar at the time in terms he knew would enrage many MPs sitting behind him.

With all these lamentations, what we never hear from our lachrymose politicians are genuine palinodes or recantations for their own errors and crimes. Blair effortlessly apologises for the Great Famine more than 160 years ago. He has never apologised, and never will apologise, for taking us into a needless, unlawful and horrible war only 10 years ago, and doing so on mendacious claims.

Others have tried to make up for that omission, including his latest successor. "I've got to be honest with you about the lessons of Iraq," Ed Miliband said in his first speech as Labour leader. "I do believe that we were wrong." But apart from the fact that he added, "I criticise nobody faced with making the toughest of decisions" (why not, if the decision wasn't really tough at all, and the wrong one was taken?), it was easy for him to say that. He wasn't in parliament in 2003, and he never had to choose whether to support Blair like his brother David and the deplorable majority of Labour MPs or join the 139 Labour dissidents.

Someone who might more appropriately apologise for Iraq is Cameron, who did vote for the war in the Commons divisions in March 10 years ago, and has been thoroughly shifty about it since. And another field for contrition suggested itself on reading Larry Elliott's latest well-informed jeremiad, which included the riveting sentence, "Household debt rose from about 101% of national output at the start of 1997, to 169% in mid-2007."

Hang on, don't those dates have a certain ring? Wasn't the chancellor for exactly those 10 years a chap called Gordon Brown? Wasn't Ed Miliband his special adviser from 1997 to 2002? And didn't Brown then make Miliband chairman of the Treasury council in January 2004, in succession to another Ed, Balls of that ilk?

History to the defeated, Auden observed, "May say Alas, but cannot help or pardon". Rather than pointlessly saying "Alas" to the distant defeated, and apologising for universally acknowledged crimes, our rulers might spend more time examining their own grave errors.